Adventures in Centro

Recife's Centro is always an adventure. A tightly packed neighbourhood of narrow streets, back alleys, wholesale & retail shops, market kiosques, street hawkers, magic-potion and herb sellers, driven bargain hunters, and colonial churches, Centro is home to whatever it is that you may be looking for. Trouble is, you may end up spending hours going from store to store and sifting through mechandise that has been there since the forties mixed in with the latest tropic trends before you find it.

Each street in Centro has a theme, which makes it a bit easier to navigate - there's the sewing and related notions street, the party acessories street, the office and craft supply street, the baby clothing street, the hardware street, the shoe store street, the strange Amazonian elixirs alley, the hair saloon supply lane, etc. Even if you don't end up finding what you came for [inconceivable!], Centro is always guaranteed to be exciting.

On Saturday morning, needing to pick up a few items that are available No Where Else in the City Except Centro, I threw caution to the wind and headed downtown. On my shopping list:

1. Two spools of thread. One peach, one green. Found them in Store #2.
2. Buttons & Velcro. Found them in store #5, tucked away among sewing supplies that were probably donated to the store in the 1920s and never touched since. Discovered that velcro in Portuguese is still velcro!
3. Individually sold grommets. Found them in a back alley, hidden behind a backpack seller, a purse-mender and a snack seller.
4. Little Tool used to apply grommets. Found in store #12. Later turned out to be only the bit of a much larger tool, which I will surely not buy!
5. 3m of cord. Found in a street stand. Discovered at home that the 3m was actually 2m tied to 1m....

In all a success! Except for the part about the missized cord and the wrong tool-bit, of course. The cord I may be able to deal with, but I will most likely have to go back into Centro next weekend to get the guy who sold me the grommets - who in fact is a grommetteer by trade - to put them into my finished pieces as well. It would be too easy otherwise, wouldn't it?

Coming Soon: Adventures in Centro: Part II